I wrote Food Truths, Food Lies after spending years trying to help my patients sort through their food and weight issues. There is plenty of research showing how bad we all are at estimating how many calories we eat. We can be off by hundreds of calories when quizzed about portion size! This universal ‘bad guessing’ is one of the biggest reasons Americans are so big.

As food portions have grown over the years, our ability to accurately judge calorie content hasn’t. I recently came across another study that looks at this issue from a little different angle.

This 2006 study is by my favorite ‘Food Psychologist’ Brian Wansink. He and his co-author used different size meals to figure out if the “who” or “what size” was more important in judging calorie counts.

It would be easy (and wrong, according to Dr. Wansink) to imagine that overweight or